Talent Agent Saves Woman’s Life On Delta Air Lines Flight

UPDATE: Friday, Sept. 22, 2017 at 12:41 p.m. EDT: Seth Oster, Global Head of Corporate Communications at United Talent Agency, confirmed to the International Business Times that the incident took place as reported.

Original story:

Talent agent Jeremy Barber, who works with a roster of famous clientele, reportedly saved a woman’s life aboard a recent Delta Air Lines flight. The incident occurred on a flight from the from the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado to Los Angeles.

A witness told Page Six in a report published Tuesday that Barber moved to action after a woman in the row ahead of him began choking. Employing the Heimlich maneuver, which he reportedly hadn’t used since learning it in high school, Barber has able to save the woman from choking to death. The witness told the gossip site that following “five or six tries, it came up.”

“She was about to die. It was not good. People were freaking out,” the witness told Page Six. “[H]e really saved her life.”

The witness said that upon arriving on the flight, Barber had helped the same woman load her luggage into the overhead bin. When the woman confirmed that Barber was indeed the man who had come to her aid not once, but twice, he reportedly joked: “That’s the last thing I’m doing for you on this flight!”

It was clear neither on what day the flight took place nor what the woman had choked on in the report. Seth Oster, Global Head of Corporate Communications at United Talent Agency, confirmed to the International Business Times that the incident took place as reported. Delta declined IBT’s request for comment, citing customer privacy.

Barber is a partner at United Talent Agency and works with clients who include Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Patrick Dempsey, Steve Coogan, Sigourney Weaver and Justin Theroux, according to Variety. He was named a partner of UTA in 2009 after being with the company since 2003.

“Jeremy has been an extraordinary asset to UTA in the motion picture department and to the agency overall,” UTA chairman Jim Berkus said.

Barber isn’t the only high profile personality to come to the aid of choking travelers in recent months. Chicago Bears linebacker Jerrell Freeman used the Heimlich maneuver to save a man choking on food at the Austin Airport in July. The man was eating barbecue at a restaurant in the airport at the time of the event, and Freeman noticed something was amiss when the man appeared to be in distress.

“I grabbed him and tried to squeeze the life out of him,” Freeman told Chicago Tribune at the time. “You’ve got to push in and up. So I did that and he started throwing up what he was choking on. I asked him if he was all right and he shook his head like ‘No!’”